Day Five

Got back from my first class meeting. Rocky at the beginning (I floundered a lot) but it got much more productive once we got past the Girl/My Name stuff only because I don’t think she was very into the exercise? I could see the comprehension dawning in Tutee X’s eyes. Huh. Didn’t know it would feel that…fulfilling, I guess, to help someone understand a concept.

This is truly a “Choose your own adventure” sort of class. I feel like we made progress.

We went over that exercise first. Then did a really, really extensive reading of “Birthday Party.” She did most of the analysis while I tried to guide a little. She was quite good at it, better than I think her writing would indicate. Perhaps instead of her outlines, I can encourage her to making more annotations on the actual text. Perhaps then it might be easier for her to see threads and commonalities and things. Then, we read “Indian Camp” by Hemingway, talked about it a little, paying attention to dialogue, things you can learn about a character and how they can change throughout the story, pinpointing where that happens, looking at how a seemingly simple story has depth to it.

Next week:

• examples of strong essays
• words to describe tone, possibly other writerly words commonly used in analysis just to get a better/more sophisticated vocabulary
• maybe bring in some more short passages, get her attuned to looking at details, picking them out to support an argument